Children and Technology: "A 2.5 Year-Old Has A First Encounter With An iPad"

"A fascinating UI experiment. My daughter likes playing with my iPhone, but this was her very first encounter with an iPad. As you'll see, she took right to it... although she too wonders why it doesn't have a camera! More critical comment on her user-interface test here: http://laughingsquid.com/a-2-5-year-old-uses-an-ipad-for-... PS: The spelling apps she uses in the video are FirstWords Animals and FirstWords Vehicles. They're great... except for the fact that the splash screen UI is non-intuitive for her. ;-)" -Todd Lappin (the dad in the video)

"If you’re good at understanding kid-speak, you’ll also notice that she immediately saw its potential as a video-display device. She lamented the lack of a camera, and wondered about its potential for playing games"

I took this class when I attended the recent CHI 2010 conference. We worked in groups and I was assigned the role of a 7 year-old child, designing an iPad app for "kid reporters". It was fun. Note: For the iPad to be used this way in education, it really needs to have a camera/video camera.

"...But these are also technology tools that children even 10 years older did not grow up with, and I’ve begun to think that my daughter’s generation will also be utterly unlike those that preceded it. Researchers are exploring this notion too. They theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development."... “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”..." -Brad Stone

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